Exploring Australian Health Promotion Practitioners’ Awareness, Understanding and Application of Theories of the Policy Process in Health Promotion Practice: A Qualitative Study
Rhian Jones, Kara Lilly, Rachel Cole · 2026
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Description
Jones, Lilly, and Cole explore, in 2026, how Australian health promotion practitioners use theories of the policy process, the frameworks for understanding how policy gets made and changed. Influencing policy is a core professional function, yet engagement with the theory behind it was unstudied. They interviewed practitioners working in Queensland online, using semi-structured conversations analyzed by reflexive thematic analysis.
Ten practitioners took part, eight recruited purposively and two by snowball sampling, with a median of 18 years of industry experience spanning one to 24 years across the group. Four themes emerged. Practitioners grasp policy complexity but barely know the theories by name; they nonetheless apply the theories' constructs implicitly in daily work. Organizational context decides how far they can engage policy, and industry-level factors gate their involvement. A cited United States study echoes the gap, with 78 percent of students valuing policy action but 76 percent lacking understanding of the process.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Rhian Jones, Kara Lilly, Rachel Cole |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 45 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |